The Abyss

by Lara Blunte

  Clara saw that the children were scared, hurt, lost. She looked at her husband, whose throat had been cut, whose father had thought it better to throw him in the street than to let him love a girl.

  All of us are broken, and yet love could heal us all, she thought. Gabriel brought us together, and we could be happy here, in this beautiful place.

  Having spent most of the day with her father, that night Iara agreed to sleep with Teté, and the doctor made his round, seeing that Gabriel's fever had increased a little, but that there was still no sign of infection. "Just keep watching," he repeated.

  Clara was left alone with Gabriel as everyone retired, but Lucia was nearby, as were Celso and Sebastião, if anything were needed.

  As she sat with Gabriel, Clara did not dare touch him anymore, now that Iara was not there. She only put her hand on his forehead at different intervals, to make sure that the fever wasn't rising. Finally she fell asleep in her chair.

  A while later she woke with a start. The candles still burned brightly on both sides of the bed, so she could not have slept very long. As she turned to look at Gabriel, she saw that his eyes were open and that, it seemed, he had been watching her for a while.

  "What is it?" she asked, when he didn't say anything. She got up and moved to the bed, bending over him. "Are you all right?"

  His eyes seemed feverish, but when she reached out to feel his forehead he took her wrist.

  "What is it?" she asked again, sitting next to him.

  He looked at the bracelet, and only then did she realize that she was still wearing it. He tugged on it, the fastening broke again, and he threw it on the floor. Then he pulled her, made her lie on the bed, and turned on his side. His eyes scanned her face as his thumb caressed her cheek, then her lips.

  "You have a fever," she whispered. "You have lost a lot of blood."

  He gave no indication that he was listening to her; instead he lowered his head, his lips closed over hers, and he began to kiss her as he used to do, when he had loved her.

  She wanted to protest and say that he might hurt himself, but had she not thought, upon seeing him again in Rio, that he was as strong as an oak, and that nothing could cut him down?

  He is so strong, she thought, reaching up to hold his head so that he would not stop kissing her. Nothing can harm him.

  Gabriel opened her dress, and touched her breast, and she held his hand over it. He felt hot even when he entered her, but she kept him inside with her thighs to feel as much of him as she could. It had been so long, so long, and she had so yearned for him.

  Perhaps he did not know what he was doing, he did not know that he hated her ─ and she could not remember either that she had been angry at him. She burned in the heat of his fever, and she knew no harm would come to him.

  Thirty-Four: Hard Hearts

  Gabriel was aware that the fever had made him lose his usual control over himself, and that he had made love to his wife. However, as soon as he woke up the next morning, his doubts were pecking at him like a flock of crows once more.

  Sensitive as she was to others, Clara had probably understood that it might be the case, and she was not in bed with him. It was Lucia who came in with his breakfast, and Clara only walked in a quarter of an hour later to change his bandage.

  Her eyes were evading his, which was not like her. He wondered if she felt guilty that he had almost died because of a man who had fallen in love with her, a man she had encouraged─ or worse. Or did she feel ashamed that they had been intimate the night before, in spite of the fact that no real reconciliation had been made? Did she remember that she had been wearing the gold bracelet, probably to anger and defy him?

  Yet when she was changing his dressing her eyes flew to his, and there was something different than shame in them; there was joy, and even a little mischief.

  This was always when she was most irresistible to him: when she was the combination of the girl he had known in Lisbon, witty and playful, and the woman she had become.

  Yet she had confessed that she had been the Baron's mistress. He was intelligent enough to know that she might have wanted to hurt him, and her words had hurt almost as much as the bullet. They had also fed a doubt that had hardly needed any fuel.

  More importantly, he had found her with Tarcisio, even as she tried to leave him behind.

  How could he know what was the truth? He had allowed himself to be lulled into trusting her again after observing her for months, only to find her running away with a man under his nose.

  That very mischievous look she had just thrown him ─which had made him turn his head so that she would not see the smile it provoked─ might have been used to entice other men to do as she willed.

  He was tired of his own mind; the cachaça at the Botada and the fever had made him push every terrible possibility aside and concentrate only on how much he wanted Clara, how much he yearned to be happy with her.

  "If you look long enough at people you will find something bad in them," Pai Bernardo had told him before the feast." If you don't find it, you will imagine it."

  He wished that he could always suspend his judgment, as if he were always drunk, always feverish: was not love precisely that, a sickness of the blood, a loss of control?

  His thoughts did not leave him alone, and Clara saw it. The tenderness in her touch as she wrapped his bandage, and her eyes now cast down in sadness tugged at his heart and made him want to beg her once more: Just tell me the truth, and I will still find a way to love you. I want to love you!

  She might be using an arsenal of wiles to get him to capitulate. He had almost died, and a man was now in prison for trying to kill him: had she caused all of this just to get her way?

  Who was she?

  In any case, he would not stay in the room anymore, though the wound still hurt and he must be careful not to pull at the stitches. He had a little fever, but he could sit outside in the garden.

  As he reached a chair under the shade of the big tree, Clara came out of the house holding Iara by the hand. The little girl's face lit up like a sun when she saw him, and Clara let go of her hand so that she could run to him.

  He let Iara climb on his lap and held her. He glanced at Clara and saw that she was smiling and standing back, as if to let him have his moment with the girl. Though he could see that she had begun to love the child, she had clearly understood that he needed to have Iara to himself, at least for now.

  "Am I only able to love children," he wondered, "because they are still innocent? Will I, like my father, not love this little girl if one day she does what I don't like?"

  His hand tightened around Iara; could he ever throw her out and hate her?

  He realized that Clara was still a little girl to her father, and knew that Pedro would have forgiven anything she might have done, such was his love for her. He almost sighed: his head hurt, his chest hurt in more than one way, and it was not the first time he wished that his nature were simpler.

  Two weeks after the shooting, the commissary of police came to the house. It irked Gabriel to be forced to give an account of what had happened, but everyone for miles knew that he had found his wife and the foreman in the forest and that he had given the man a beating. The commissary was apologetic when he asked to speak to Dona Clara, and Gabriel insisted that they do so in his presence.

  The man had understood that there had been a quarrel between husband and wife, and a misunderstanding about the nature of Dona Clara's escape which led to Tarcisio's beating. The beating had then led to the attempted murder. They were no strangers to such things in the heartland: there men tried to kill each other over women, over honor, over land, or just out of boredom.

  But Dom Gabriel was immensely rich, and a friend of Prince John, so they tread lightly. There would be a trial, they said as they left.

  "What will happen to Tarcisio?" Clara wondered when they were alone.

  "Am I to believe that you are still speaking in his favor?" Gabriel asked quietly after a momen
t.

  "I hate him for trying to kill you," she said. "I think he deserves to be in jail for that. But his children..."

  "They are not your responsibility."

  She would not be discouraged from asking, "Are you throwing Moema out?"

  "I will pay what I owe that murderer to her and help her go somewhere else. But she can't stay here. I will give her enough time to leave."

  Gabriel's tone was final and some anger had crept into his voice. Clara did not want to insist that she was concerned for the children without their father.

  However, she was not a woman who could put matters so important to others aside. As the subject must not be discussed with her husband, she decided to go to Moema's house and see if she could help with money, or with a letter to her father in Rio asking that he find her employment and a home.

  She had seen Moema, though they had never spoken, and she knew that the woman might think the same thing Gabriel had thought: that she and Tarcisio had been lovers. Clara wanted to assure her that it wasn't true. It did not surprise her that Moema should frown at her, or that her eyes should be full of suspicion and disdain. It was her penance for having involved Tarcisio in her escape.

  "I could not ever express how much I repent asking Tarcisio to help me," she said, standing in Moema's kitchen.

  Two pretty little boys and a baby, the children whose father was now in jail, had been bundled out of the room, and Clara had not been asked to sit down. She continued, "I know it's no consolation for you to know that he was simply helping me get to Paraty, and that there were never a word or deed..."

  "Are you really that naive?"

  The question came like a quick, dry slap. Clara was surprised, not only because Moema owed her respect as the wife of the estate owner, but because she had hardly ever been addressed so abruptly by a stranger. She had to remind herself of the terrible turn the woman’s life had taken.

  "Do you think that men do favors for ladies who look like you and expect nothing?" Moema added. "Men are very foolish, and expect something from even the most impossible situation. He was in love with you."

  Clara was taken aback, "You must not speak like that. I am married!"

  "Yes, and in love with your husband, I told Tarcisio so. I told him he was a fool. But perhaps he ought not to have been invited to go anywhere with you!"

  "How can anyone believe there might be a reason for what he did?" Clara asked, flushing. "He tried to kill a man!"

  "A man who had beaten and humiliated him. Do you think that the people you pay have no pride?"

  Clara could clearly see that pride was the most important thing to the woman before her; there was no sadness, no compassion for Tarcisio in her face.

  "We had better not talk about these things," she said. "Tarcisio faces the gravest accusation there can be against anyone, only made less serious by the fact that my husband survived. It's not out of concern for him, but for you and your children that I am here."

  Moema was looking at her quietly and her eyes were like two black pebbles, dead and hard. "You need have no concern for us."

  "But I do," Clara insisted, "I can help you find work, a house. My father can help you in Rio."

  "I am not going to Rio," Moema stated flatly.

  "Where will you go, then?"

  "Allow me to decide that."

  "And the children?"

  The woman was silent for such a long moment that it seemed as if she would not reply, but then she said, "There is a place for them." She was almost smiling, but her eyes were still hard. "There is a place for all of us. I am taking them there tomorrow, when I leave here."

  "If you need more time..."

  "I don't. I will be gone tomorrow."

  Clara saw that there was nothing else to be said. Moema would not let her help them; she understood that the stern woman standing there with her arms crossed wished for her life to be as difficult as possible, so that she could keep nourishing the sense of having been wronged.

  Thirty-Five: A Thing

  The unease that Clara felt at meeting Moema, and at what the woman had said to her persisted through the afternoon. By evening, a heavy, almost malignant rain had begun to fall.

  She tried to put her finger on what it was about Moema that had filled her with a foreboding that only kept increasing, until she sat at dinner pressing a fist over her stomach.

  "Do you feel ill?" Gabriel asked her.

  Clara realized that he had been watching her, though Iara was sitting on his lap again, and he was feeding her. She wanted to say that he needed to rest, or he might still develop an infection. However, she knew that he would pay no heed to her.

  "No, I am fine," she said, dropping her hand onto her lap.

  Yet when Teté was helping her undress she told her, "Teté, I need someone to watch Moema's house."

  Poor Teté's eyes were immediately full of anxiety. She had never recovered from her participation in Clara's escape, and very much blamed herself for everything that had happened. If she had never thought it a good idea to involve Tarcisio he would not be in jail, perhaps forever, and his children would not be fatherless; sinhô would not have almost died. She had lost her lively manner, and looked sad and haunted.

  "Why, sinhá?" she asked, one hand hiding her trembling lip.

  Clara took her hand and pressed it, "We must think how to remedy things, little by little, but not torment ourselves with the silly mistakes we made. We never meant any harm. But I am afraid of that woman, there was something about her. I can't say what it was, but I keep feeling as though she is not finished with us, or with Tarcisio."

  Teté was nodding, her eyes wide, "Sinhá, she is a very strange woman. She always goes to the Africans for the macumba, you know? I feel sorry for her children..."

  "Does she mistreat them?" Clara asked sharply.

  Teté shook her head, "No, it's not that. But it was Seu Tarcisio that was sweet to them, he loves them very much..."

  Clara went to sleep with a feeling of dread, and had incoherent dreams full of darkness as the rain pelted the roof with such force that it sounded as though horses were running on it. She woke up with a start and immediately remembered Moema's words: There is a place for them.

  She sat up in bed, her heart beating so wildly that her throat hurt.

  There is a place for all of us.

  No! Clara thought. She flew out of her bed, picked up the dress that she had worn to dinner the night before and put it on, then she ran down the stairs to find Gabriel in his study, "She is going to kill them!"

  Gabriel ran his eyes over his wife, who looked wild in a crumpled dress, her hair loose.

  "What do you mean, Clara?"

  "Moema is going to kill those children!"

  He frowned, "Don't be preposterous, they are her children. She isn't some sort of Medea!"

  "She is, she is!" Clara cried. "That's exactly what she is, a woman who loves her pride more than her children. She wants to do something so awful that none of us will recover from it! She wants to punish her husband!"

  Gabriel stood up so quickly that she took a step back. "I have told you before, that subject is closed! I will not have you trying to save that man!"

  "I am not speaking of him, but of his children!" she insisted.

  "I don't care," Gabriel said harshly. "Leave me alone about the one and the other. You have created this situation, in your need to have men do whatever you want!"

  He would have walked out, but she moved and now stood in his way. Her face had gone pale, but her eyes were suddenly furious, "I have borne this long enough!" she said in a strong voice that was very unlike her usual tone.

  "What is it that you mean now?" he asked with cold anger.

  But for once she was angrier than him. "I have listened to you call me all sorts of horrible things for months," she said. "I have tolerated you speaking of me, who have never told a lie in my life, as if I were a liar. I have been called a whore by you, when no man had ever touched me before our wed
ding night! I have sat across a table from you night after night, and slept across a corridor, I have made a life among strangers because you, who are my husband, made yourself a stranger to me!"

  Gabriel's jaw was tightening, “I almost died and a man is now in jail because of you!” he spat at her.

  "No!” she spat back. “Not because of me, not only because of me! It was you who made me want to run away, and you who beat a man without stopping to find out why he was accompanying me. It was you who believed anyone but me, so how can you think that you are innocent?"

  "I asked you to swear..." he started, taking a step toward her.

  "Enough!” she shouted. "I would not break a commandment of my faith! And if you had been the husband you should be you would not have asked me to!"

  He moved to the door and slammed it. "You tried to run away with a man not ten days ago!"

  "I was not running away with him, I was running away from you! I told you I would not live like this anymore, and I will not! I am tired of your doubts and your suspicions, I am tired of being blown one way and then another! All of this I have withstood because of one thing only: because I loved you." Her voice had not softened and now her finger came up to point at him, "But you, you lied! You told me that you would open your heart, and you never did! You believed the first lie that was said about me, when we had been married three weeks!”

  “I gave you every chance to disprove it!” he bellowed at her.

  “How can I disprove something that never happened?” she demanded. “What would you have had me do, when my mother had conspired with that man to meet me, when I have no brothers to defend me? Would you have had me tell my poor father? What could he have done to protect me?”

  Her distress at the mention of her father and of the shame she had suffered at the Baron’s hands was keen, and tears had risen to her eyes. Gabriel’s natural sense of chivalry was aroused by her obvious sincerity, but he was still rooted to the spot, unable to comfort her.